Drobo recently announced its new Drobo 5D and Drobo Mini, the newest products in its lineup of external storage arrays, and Ars got a chance to look at the devices in person at this year's Consumer Electronics Week. The new Drobos are the first to feature Thunderbolt ports for use with newer Macs and the slowly growing list of PC laptops and motherboards with Thunderbolt support; the Mini is Drobo's first unit to support 2.5-inch laptop hard drives.

Enlarge/ The Drobo Mini's external power adapter is small enough to travel, if you need to take your storage with you.

Both the Mini and the 5D also support a new feature to increase performance: when a solid-state drive is present, the new Drobos will use "data-aware tiering technology" to store files on the SSD that will benefit from faster disk access—the examples Drobo gives are Adobe Premiere and Apple Aperture, but other video and photo editing applications should work the same way. You can use a standard 2.5-inch SSD for this in either unit, if you'd like, but they also include a small hatch on the underside that gives you access to an mSATA slot. Only one SSD needs to be present to enable this feature, but you can also use nothing but SSDs in the Drobos if you don't mind trading capacity for speed.

Both models feature the same connectivity options: a single USB 3.0 port and two Thunderbolt ports which support daisy chaining—the FireWire 800 and eSATA port supported by some of the older Drobos are no longer available. With the exception of support for mSATA drives, the Drobo 5D and the Mini have mostly the same features and work the same way, but the 5D uses 3.5-inch hard drives that are larger in both size and in capacity—the Mini can store up to 3TB of data if all of its four bays are occupied with 1TB drives, while the 5D can store 16TB if its five bays are all populated with 4TB drives. In both cases, some of the storage is reserved for the purposes of data duplication.

Enlarge/ The Drobo 5D with its magnetic front cover removed to expose the drive bays. Bask in its warm, glowing warming glow.

Enlarge/ The back of the Drobo 5D shows us its USB 3.0 port and two Thunderbolt ports. The port layout of the Drobo Mini is the same, but it lacks the Kensington lock slot.

The Drobo 5D is scheduled to launch in late July for $799 without hard drives installed, and the Mini should be available in August for $599.

I wonder how many of these are sold, for that price it competes with WHSv2 machines (even better if you build it yourself). With WHSv3 around the corner, it will be a even harder sell for a good product.

I wonder how many of these are sold, for that price it competes with WHSv2 machines (even better if you build it yourself). With WHSv3 around the corner, it will be a even harder sell for a good product.

I had a WHS v1 machine that a clung to tenaciously for years. When v2 lost Drive Extender I bought a Drobo. I've been very happy with it, even in light of the price.

I wonder how many of these are sold, for that price it competes with WHSv2 machines (even better if you build it yourself). With WHSv3 around the corner, it will be a even harder sell for a good product.

I think the draw for Drobo and products like it is that it's simpler to set up, upgrade, and maintain than a homemade or pre-built file server. At least in theory, swapping out drives and maintaining data integrity is much easier than on a PC. Different products for different needs/skillsets, though - you can certainly do more with a WHS box if you're willing to maintain it.

I researched Drobo and some other NAS devices awhile ago. Drobo had an impressive feature set but were considered dogs performance wise if you have more than a couple of concurrent requests. It will be interesting to see how they perform with SSD's.

I hope they have upped the performance. I have an older one on FW800, and its slow. Real slow. I think it peaked at 25MB/s, and thats with 5 drives. I would expect 5 drives of SATA in something like a RAID 5 array to be much faster then that. 25MB/s is single drive performance, or maybe even less.

Well if you are going to use thunderbolt, better stick some SSDs in there so you won't be limited by the speed of the mechanical drives. I got one of those seagate thunderbolt adapters and it wasn't much faster than my firewire 800 drives. Of course two factors being the adapter and the mechanical drive itself. They also don't make terabyte 7200 rpm 2.5 inch drives. And unfortunately a terabyte SSD doesn't exist unless you put a few together.

I have had a drobo 2 for several years. The appeal is that it's dead simple to have a redundant drive array (and it's reliable enough to have saved me from two drive failures). The speed could be better (but having a FW800 bottleneck doesn't help). Can't wait to see the performance on a TB. Supposedly they added that extra slot for the flash disk in order to be able to feed data fast enough across a TB bus.

No Benchmarks? I guess one can only assume these are slower than snot too.

We're hoping to get some test units as soon as they are available so we can benchmark them; rest assured we'll look into the performance. Though as others have noted, the newest models include an mSATA slot to add a an SSD for performance caching.

I wonder how many of these are sold, for that price it competes with WHSv2 machines (even better if you build it yourself). With WHSv3 around the corner, it will be a even harder sell for a good product.

Not only that but you probably need a new computer to take advantage of USB 3 or TB. So a $600 Mac Mini + $800 Drobo 5D + HDDs = really expensive proposition. Comparitively, HP's old Media Smart Servers sold for around $500-600 and then you just added 1 more HDD for $150 and you were set for a while.

All I really want is an external drive cage that supports 4-5 HDDs with USB 3 and UASP (USB attached SCSI Protocol) support and I'd be set. I'd get either WHS v3 w/ Storage Spaces or a Mac Mini w/ Ten's Compliment ZFS file system whenever they get around to selling it again.

I wonder how many of these are sold, for that price it competes with WHSv2 machines (even better if you build it yourself). With WHSv3 around the corner, it will be a even harder sell for a good product.

Not only that but you probably need a new computer to take advantage of USB 3 or TB. So a $600 Mac Mini + $800 Drobo 5D + HDDs = really expensive proposition. Comparitively, HP's old Media Smart Servers sold for around $500-600 and then you just added 1 more HDD for $150 and you were set for a while.

All I really want is an external drive cage that supports 4-5 HDDs with USB 3 and UASP (USB attached SCSI Protocol) support and I'd be set. I'd get either WHS v3 w/ Storage Spaces or a Mac Mini w/ Ten's Compliment ZFS file system whenever they get around to selling it again.

You know you can just buy a USB3 controller card right? $20-30 on Newegg, less than the price of a Thunderbolt cable.

I wonder how many of these are sold, for that price it competes with WHSv2 machines (even better if you build it yourself). With WHSv3 around the corner, it will be a even harder sell for a good product.

I think the draw for Drobo and products like it is that it's simpler to set up, upgrade, and maintain than a homemade or pre-built file server. At least in theory, swapping out drives and maintaining data integrity is much easier than on a PC. Different products for different needs/skillsets, though - you can certainly do more with a WHS box if you're willing to maintain it.

If you're even at the point of considering a device like this, then you're far ahead of the curve. Even being aware of RAID magnifies that. That leaves a vanishingly small group of people that are aware enough to use such a thing but not clued in enough to use a much cheaper and more manual approach.

For what you can save avoiding the more expensive gear, you can buy enough extra gear to make some of the special features of the more expensive gear moot. Plus you get actual redundancy.

Good little company with innovative products that do stuff others don't. Special credit for being one of the first to deploy Thunderbolt in a way that makes sense, i.e. daisy chaining.

I have their first model. It's proven completely reliable. There are stories out there of Drobos turning into "bricks" but it's unclear if these involve actual data loss, or if the rate is any worse than many other touted solutions. Tales of woe in either case always involve someone who relied upon a single solution expecting it to be perfect, and failing to cover their bets properly.

The same applies here. The new mini probably screams with SSD, and you'll do fine carrying it around in your backpack. But don't be a tool and have it be your only backup. The gods will then make sure that you leave it on the subway, or out in the rain.

Drobo's got a way cool approach for backup "dummies" like me, but it doesn't mean you can turn off your brain and start believing in magic.

No Benchmarks? I guess one can only assume these are slower than snot too.

We're hoping to get some test units as soon as they are available so we can benchmark them; rest assured we'll look into the performance. Though as others have noted, the newest models include an mSATA slot to add a an SSD for performance caching.

Right - just to clarify, though, the performance caching functions are the same whether you use an mSATA SSD or if you just use an SSD in one of your drive bays. We'll be able to look into how exactly how this whole thing works in our review.

I researched Drobo and some other NAS devices awhile ago. Drobo had an impressive feature set but were considered dogs performance wise if you have more than a couple of concurrent requests. It will be interesting to see how they perform with SSD's.

I'm curious as well. I still haven't understood what the advantage is compared to Synology, Qnap, etc.?

I've seen lots of comments about how slow they are and how lousy their support is. The only good thing I've heard is that they are dead simple to setup - perhaps that's enough to be popular? Not that I consider a Synology NAS to be difficult to setup but a Drobo might be much easier.

I wonder how many of these are sold, for that price it competes with WHSv2 machines (even better if you build it yourself). With WHSv3 around the corner, it will be a even harder sell for a good product.

Has MS given an ETA for WHSv3? I'm still running a WHSv1 box; but need to start planning a replacement soon. In particular, will it be out before v1 goes out of support in January of next year?

I see nothing impressive about these that would make me jump ship from my little Acer WHSv1 server. The thing just does what it needs to do, host files and provide redundant backup. The price on those Drobos is absurd, too. You could buy a competing device and stuff it with drives for the same price.

Data Robotics did a large update about a year ago (around when Apple released Lion) , and many people lost data. I had backups on tape, but mid semester I had to quick build a storage system from parts. I was not happy. Several months (more than 6) later many Drobo owners were without a functioning unit. I still don't trust data to it any longer.

I have two Drobo V2 (FW800/USB2) and they're dog slow. I use them as final data dumps for backup (onsite/offsite)

BUT i've seen speeds below 1MB/sec to them, and you never peak above 25MB/s

If its significantly faster, then I would love to use a drobo 5D via TB with my rMBP as big secondary disk

Re: Controller Redundancy. Its not on-line redundancy, but you can pull out a drobo disk set and pop it in another drobo and it'll work. Not sure if a 4 bay drobo disk set will work in a 5 bay drobo. But it is a neat feature to be able to do a backup and just store the whole disk set with single failure redundancy

I recently bought a FW800 Drobo and do like its extreme simplicity but echo the comments on slowness. I've been running several FW external drives on my iMacs for years and wanted the Drobo to finally get full redundacy on everything, but I wasn't expecting the painful delays. I had to bring back my Guardian MAXimus mirrored drive for standard usage and have relegated the Drobo to pure backup solution. It just doesn't have the performance for a daily use drive. If one recognizes that and can accomodate this weakness, it is otherwise a nifty setup for the less technically inclined.

I'm curious to know, though, if the RAID controller or whatever dies, can the drives be fully swapped out into a new Drobo unit to access all the data?

Drobos: Having owned/been responsible for four of the things, I'd NEVER buy another, and would never recommend them to anyone. Failed ports, buggy software, agonizing slowness, tech support that just does a lot of shrugging and asking to reformat... never again.

I have had a 200% failure rate on my personal unit (third unit had the FireWire port blow out but it does work via USB, although slowly, so I just put up with it) and have had a 50% failure rate on our 800fs's at work. That said, we've taken our two 800fs's out of service due to incredible flakiness and unusable slowness. 1Mb/s is too slow admits Drobo, but they sort of drifted away and rapidly auto-close any open tech support tickets.

Never again. Never, never never. If they gave me a lifetime supply of free units I'd never use one again, except as landscape filler.

My Drobo FS has been rock-solid in a small closet with five drives for the last year. One died, put a new one in, no problem.

Writes/deletes are pretty slow, but I mostly just want it to hold on to stuff. It'll stream a 1080p monster video with no issues, and that works for me.

WHS v1 is an alternative, but I had glitches with mine that I knew would never get solved by Microsoft. I thought about rolling my own NAS, but RAID has its own problems, not the least of which is the inability to expand the storage pool by one drive at a time (or differing sizes).

I dunno. There will always be tradeoffs, you need to choose the appropriate anecdotes that fit your case.

Kinda seems like the 5D is an FS that they replaced the Ethernet port on with USB 3 and Thunderbolt...Not sure it's a trade-up, though it's $100 more.

It's a direct replacement to the Drobo S, not FS. On their webinar, Drobo said to wait and see what they are going to be doing with the rest of the product line, in response to a question about their network connected storage solutions.

Data Robotics did a large update about a year ago (around when Apple released Lion) , and many people lost data. I had backups on tape, but mid semester I had to quick build a storage system from parts. I was not happy. Several months (more than 6) later many Drobo owners were without a functioning unit. I still don't trust data to it any longer.

Don't trust your data to Data Robotics.

You raise an interesting case study.

Since I got my Drobo years ago, I have closely followed postings relating horror stories of malfunctioning Drobos. They get me worried that I'm on a road to disaster.

But, when I read through the cases, one (or both) of two things always shows up:

1) It is unclear there has been any data loss.

2) Something else was going on that wasn't a Drobo issue.

The post you point to is an example. If I'm reading it correctly, the user in question upgraded to Mac OS X Lion and a connection issue arose with his Drobo. It appears there was a fix, and that it was applied.

In other cases I've read, intermittent connection failures sound related to Windows USB issues, or even the fact that the users are connecting through a USB hub, daisy-chaining over Firewire, and other combinations.

One case was a professional photographer who did have a bad time with several Drobos in a row -- incredibly frustrating, and possibly due to a bad run of Drobo board circuitry. He finally declined Drobo's offer to upgrade to a new model, and wrote a long blog post condemning Drobo. Fair enough. But it seemed he didn't actually lose any data.

I'm not saying any of this to "defend" Drobo, or claim they are perfect. Because no solution IS perfect. If you value your data, you know this and plan for failure.

What I am saying is there are a LOT of very unspecific anecdotes about failure and data loss. People do get emotional and want to blame someone or something. They hear what they want to: "Nothing can possibly go wrong."

The customer in the post you link to was, fortunately, very specific and found the solution. And, like every situation I've ever been "scared" into looking at closely, there were other factors involved.

It's not helpful for people to hear frightening folk tales, and lurch from one solution to another. There may be data loss out there somewhere. I don't know. But what I've seen so far have turned out to be angry, scary headlines to stories that are very, very vague on the specifics.

My take: Drobo has a great concept, and my evidence is they've delivered quite well.

Even so, I would NEVER trust even a Drobo 100% by itself with 30 years of family photos. That would be just stupid.

The most discouraging thing about using the Drobo solution is you are 100% dependent on their Beyond Raid controller / algorithm. You cannot in any way, that I am aware of, get at the data from the hard drives without a Drobo Unit.

That's fine if you love their ease of use solution and are willing to pay the price to get new units as necessary. For a situation where your data is critical and you need it to do business, it would be silly to not subscribe to their DroboCare (tm) plans so you can get replacement hardware within a day of so of a unit failure. Otherwise you have to wait while you ship the old damaged unit back and when Drobo gets it, verifies that it is bad, and then they send you out a replacement. Another thing to consider, the last I checked about a month ago, the DroboCare plans are for 3 years max. Be prepared to buy their newest products to get access to replacement Drobo hardware. Otherwise your data isn't protected by anything. Redundantly shared, yes. Protected, not really. Not unless you back it up to some other location, and a lot of people are mistakenly treating the Drobo unit as a backup solution too. Drobo offers backup solutions and I haven't looked at those closely yet. I would be interested to know how they compare to other backup solutions.

Anyway, it is something to consider when people are looking at the options for redundant drive arrays. I love what Drobo did in terms of ease of use, but having your data held hostage to a proprietary company is much too high of a cost for a lot of business cases.

Anyway, it is something to consider when people are looking at the options for redundant drive arrays. I love what Drobo did in terms of ease of use, but having your data held hostage to a proprietary company is much too high of a cost for a lot of business cases.

It's worse than this, they have issued firmware upgrade that were untested in the past. It was impossible to retrieve data off of those units. They would operate so slow, and then just time out. If they tested properly before rolling out upgrades, and they don't have a huge hardware compatability list to test against they would never have earned their current reputation.

Data Robotics did a large update about a year ago (around when Apple released Lion) , and many people lost data. I had backups on tape, but mid semester I had to quick build a storage system from parts. I was not happy. Several months (more than 6) later many Drobo owners were without a functioning unit. I still don't trust data to it any longer.

Don't trust your data to Data Robotics.

My take: Drobo has a great concept, and my evidence is they've delivered quite well.

What "evidence" would that be? I suggest you read from their former customers right here. Before they delivered their botched firmware upgrade, I would have agreed with your statement, but now after seeing what that company does? Not so much.

That thread had many more people with many different issues that the firmware upgrade inflicted upon them. Some used firewire, others used iSCSI, and some were using NAS. All of them had different problems needing bug fixes.

As an aside: The netatalk project held out the current release until Data Robotics, and a few other companies finally donated some funds for their work.

I've always wondered how these devices garner such a response. I mean, the are very expensive, and historically have been very slow.

I have bought 3 of these devices for business (medium sized healthcare business) over the past 6 years for poor man NAS/SAN setups for the test/development network. One was just a Drobo FS, two were Drobo Pros (with iSCSI) and I have been thoroughly impressed. Obviously the FS ones were more DAS devices for the Pro using iSCSI surprisingly acted as a great SAN storage system with 8TB available. I have not had any hardware failures other than one SATA drive dying, but with its proprietary RAID like system I lost no data.